Let’s Mess With Texas!

A Tuna Christmas @ Rubicon Theatre Company

Reviewed 7 December, 2014 by Robert Roll

The holidays are a perfect time to step out with friends or family and indulge in the real magic of live theatre. It’s a true gift to spend some downtime with our loved ones, our community and the talented people who sacrifice some of their precious holiday time to put on a show for us.

Our choices this year are abundant and varied.  For those who balk at the peppermint sweetness of a "family-friendly" show, or worry they may nod off to the dreamy strains of the symphony, the Rubicon in Ventura offers a tart alternative.  

Its wildly popular holiday revue "A Rubicon Family Christmas" takes a hiatus this season as the company presents a lively rendition of A Tuna Christmas—the sassy and rather cynical second installment of the "Greater Tuna series" of two-man shows penned by Joe Sears, Ed Howard and Jaston Williams.

The Rubicon has cast a pair of terrific character actors in the show; Broadway vet and Rubicon favorite Jamie Torcellini with the Company’s certified wunderkind Brian McDonald (who also directs). 

Brian McDonald and Jamie Torcellini in A Tuna Christmas

The players rise to the task of inhabiting a dozen different roles apiece, each with his (or her–a lot of “hers”, actually) own personal backstory, physical mannerisms and dialects.  It’s telling that the intermission crowd was discussing each of the play’s characters as if they were fully realized individuals, rather than facets of two individual performances.

Set in rural Tuna, the “third smallest town in Texas”, original cast members Howard and Williams built something of a cult following over the last quarter century skewering the prairie taboos of sex, religion, politics and bedrock values of the tiny burg’s quirky residents.  Texans love this stuff.  The plays’re funny because they’re so true!  These plays are, however, Texans making fun of Texans.  Two good ol’ boys playin’ all the parts–even the women folk–dressin' up in wigs and high heels and panty hose and lipstick…  Boy, Howdy!

The original production and its subsequent touring performances diverge from the Rubicon offering in one critical aspect.  Howard and Williams winked to their audience, “Don’t Mess With Texas unless you're from Texas”.  Skilled as they are, Messrs. McDonald and Torcellini are terrific actors playing roles.  Just as it would be mean-spirited of two Texans to do a play peppered with tasteless Polish jokes, their play may ask too much of anyone other than themselves to own sufficient Austin hipster-cred necessary to mean-spiritedly ridicule those dumb-as-dirt natives of the Lone Star State.

That said, if you can embrace the Texas-for-Texans premise, A Tuna Christmas delivers a show, light on plot and long on characterization, which serves up some redneck laughs in equal measure with a few genuinely poignant moments.  

Christopher Beyries’ versatile set design and Lighting Director Johnny Ryman’s effects conduct the viewer from place to place as adeptly as the cast’s deft character segues.  A special nod is earned by Sound Designer Cricket Meyers for making some offstage business seem three-dimensionally real.  Costumes by Michael Mullen and a dazzling array of wigs and hairpieces designed by Danielle White gave the cast just the right equipment to realize their two-man “cast of dozens”.

A Tuna Christmas by Joe Sears, Ed Howard and Jaston Williams

Rubicon Theatre Company

1006 East Main Street

Ventura, CA  93001

Wednesdays 12/10, 12/17 2 p.m. and 7 p.m

Thursdays 12/11, 12/18 8 p.m.

Fridays 12/12, 12/19 8 p.m.

Saturdays 12/13, 12/20 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Sundays 12/14, 12/21 2 p.m.

Tickets and Information: 805.667.2900

www.rubicontheatre.org

 

ISC’s Dickens: Make time for a treat! Give yourself a present.

-->Most of us immediately think of Alastair Sim’s Scrooge in the 1951 movie version of A Christmas Carol about the time that the Thanksgiving dishes have been washed and put away.  The tradition of Scrooge and Marley and the Cratchits is one we’ve heard a hundred times and counting.  The true poetry of Charles Dickens is really in the story telling itself.  Of course, the movie and the sundry plays with top hats and empty scuttles of coal or even Bill Murray’s “Scrooged” come to mind.  Today I learned that the way the story really must be enjoyed is by hearing Dickens’ words.  Dickens’ words delivered by …   Dickens!  They must be narrated as well as acted out.  The poetry must roll from the tongue with a slight British accent; a little music, a little song and the warmth and spirit of Christmas.  Scrooge’s story must be gently spread before us like the wonderful feast it is.

I’m happy to announce that The Independent Shakespeare Company’s tradition of presenting A Christmas Carol With Charles Dickens in just such a manner fills the bill to the brim and over flows with poetry and drama in a way so charming, so professional and with so much joy that it simply must not be missed.

ISC’s tiny space in an industrial complex in Atwater goes to prove that it’s the work that comes first.  The imagination and the dedication to the story and the work of the director (smoothly conducted by Melissa Chalsma) is flawless.  With Mr. David Melville, as Scrooge as well as the sundry other characters, including Marley, the Ghosts and most of the Cratchits; assisted ably by the lovely Miss Julia Aks, ISC presents the tale of miserable Scrooge with gusto and verve and the great good humor that must be much like the way Dickens himself may have presented the story a hundred and sixty years ago. 

Program notes remind us (as we were recently reminded in last year’s The Invisible Woman with Ralph Fiennes as Dickens) that the man not only gave us a wealth of classic and memorable stories, but he was also an actor.  Evidently, he caused some women to faint when he portrayed Bill Sykes in his dark tale of Oliver Twist! As Dickens, Melville welcomes the audience though not all that happy to be in a dinky little space in Atwater and needs reminding to introduce his pretty assistant, Miss Aks.  Melville embraces Dickens as one might enjoy the embrace of an old familiar cloak.  He wears him and becomes him as he brings Bob Cratchit, his hard working ‘clark’ to life and then embarks on his journeys with the Ghosts:  Marley arrives with chains (sfx by Miss Aks) and tells Ebenezer that it’s time to assess his life and watch out for the Spirits who will visit him in the subsequent nights to come. Melville provides the dialog for all but a few of the well known characters, having a splendid time the Scrooge’s nephew, Fred and all.  We see Scrooge through the magic of The Ghost of Christmas Past and learn that his greed and ambition cost him the love of his fiancé, Belle, played with tenderness by Miss Aks. 

The seats in the ISC space are more practical than comfortable, so bring a pillow, but whatever you to do treat yourself to fine theatre and the true spirit of Christmas this year, make it over to Atwater and enjoy Melville and Aks in A Christmas Carol!

A CHRISTMAS CAROL With Charles Dickens by Charles Dickens

The Independent Shakespeare Company

3191 Casitas Avenue  #168

Los Angeles, CA 90039

Only 4 performances   

Saturday December 13 at 2PM and 7:30PM

Saturday December 20 at 2PM and 7:30PM

**The performance 12/13 at 7:30 pm is SOLD OUT
**The performances 12/20 at 2:00 and 7:30 are SOLD OUT

Tickets and Information: 818 710 6306

www.iscla.org

Broomstick at The Fountain

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Broomstick by John Biguenet

The Fountain Theatre in Hollywood chalks up another winner with Jenny O’Hara starring as “Witch” in the extended Broomstick.  

Jenny O'Hara as Witch / Photo: Ed Krieger

  

The last time I saw O’Hara on stage was here at The Fountain with her talented husband Nick Ullett in Steven Sachs’s brilliant “Bakersfield Mist.”  Sachs directs this one with a steady hand.  

I’ve always rejected the term ‘character’ actor because, in fact, every single character we’ve ever seen on stage or in the movies is a persona inhabited by a skilled (hopefully) actor who is acting out the part.  Jenny’s husband, Nick, actually played himself in his one person show, “Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard,” at the Matrix four years ago and in so doing, recreated himself to much acclaim. 

O’Hara takes Biguenet’s eighty minutes of rhyming couplets and spins them into tales: chilling and inquisitive.  At rise, Witch is visited by someone whom she ‘took in’ when he was a child and chides him for being shy. She goes on to tell how holding him off the floor by the hair of his head helped him calm down. This sets the tone for Biguenet’s couplets which O’Hara delivers with skill.

For over forty years on film, on television and on the stage, O’Hara has been a working actor.  She never holds back.  Indeed, in Broomstick, Witch, is an out there gal.  Witty and present, alive and feisty within her fairy tale hovel (brilliant Hobbit Hole set by designer Andrew Hammer, aided and abetted by Jennifer Edwards’ lighting that almost becomes another character in the play and Peter Bayne’s ebullient sound) where her story unfolds. O’Hara works her magic on an appreciative audience.

Witch recalls that she has always felt ‘misunderstood’ from the time she was a tiny child and goes on to relate an early romance with a beau whom she loved.  Losing him seemed to turn her toward discovery of her special powers.  The show has been extended, giving late comers, like me, the opportunity to see a well written show expertly presented in this, the 24^th season of The Fountain. 

"Broomstick"  by John Biguenet

Fountain Theatre

5060 Fountain Ave.

Los Angeles, CA 90029

8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays

2 p.m. Sundays. 

Extended to December 14, 2014

Tickets and information: (323) 663-1525

 www.FountainTheatre.com